Before my daughter ran away, she stood in the kitchen with one hand pressed to the patio door. I had just Windexed. Max knew this. I saw the cruel satisfaction lighting her eyes as she smeared fingerprints across the glass.
“I mean it,” she said. “I’m leaving. And you’re going to regret it. You’re gonna remember this moment for the rest of your life.”
She wore gray sweatpants, Converse sneakers, and a red Linkin Park T-shirt that I would later recall in detail for the police. Sweat had sculpted her black hair into spikes. Twenty minutes ago, we’d been sealed peacefully in our separate spheres: Max in the basement, taped fists thundering a punching bag, and me in the kitchen, chopping tomatoes for a dinner she now refused to eat.
“Go ahead,” I snapped. “Let’s see how long you last out there. Please. You’d be doing me a favor.”
Her lips compressed, rolled inward, as if in her fury she was trying to devour her own mouth. This was something she got from me. It means a lot, when your kid’s adopted, to see the gestures they pick up. From Rhonda, Maxine learned to pick her fingernails, to overuse air quotes, to toss her head back dramatically each time she swallowed a pill. In her anger, though, Max was all mine. Maybe that’s why we fought so much. Rage as common ground. We fought over curfews and car privileges—the usual sites of mother-daughter contention—and then we fought over things that didn’t matter, over Advil versus Aleve and the merits of yoga and whether a sweater was blue-green or just regular green. Rhonda, a sweet, pacifying person who lay awake worrying about her failing trig students, didn’t understand how these fights could fill me with simultaneous fury and joy. My blood sang in my ears as I screamed. Often I’d collapse into hiccupping laughter the moment Max left the room.
The night that she ran—a March night, still stiff with winter’s chill—and disappeared across the lighted patio, we’d been fighting over food. Max said she wanted to go vegan. I said she could eat whatever the hell I cooked and be grateful for it. The fight was briefer than usual. Max fled before I’d reached the bone-quaking peak of my volume. As I slid the tomatoes into the skillet, I suffered a sense of letdown. I had thought there would be more.
At first it brought Rhonda and me together, the way unexpected loss sometimes does. We returned to the streets of Tacoma long after the local search parties had disbanded for the night, our bathrobes flapping beneath the hems of our winter coats. We visited our parents—mine in Kansas City, hers out in Rhode Island. We ate our mothers’ food and endured our fathers’ blank-eyed smiles. We weren’t having sex anymore, but we held hands all the time.
She said, “I don’t blame you. It’s not your fault.”
And then she sobbed and said, “This is all your fault!”
And then she didn’t say anything. For weeks on end, she had nothing to say. That was when I knew it was over.
She accepted a teaching position at some SUNY I’d never heard of. I stayed behind, quit my admin job at Puget Sound, and became one of those unaffiliated drifters that hangs about college towns. I had some savings, enough for a year, more if I stopped eating. My former colleague, Nathan, stopped by once a week with his wife, Gwen. “To get you out of the house,” he said. They bustled me around on day trips—museums, parks, the movies, the library—as if I were an invalid aunt whose care had fallen into their hands.
Actually, I did like going to the public library. I hadn’t been since Max was little and we switched over to the university library for convenience’s sake. You would’ve thought I’d be depressed, holding the same sticky copy of The Snowy Day my daughter had once clasped in her fingers. But in the library, I discovered a quieting of self-hatred that was almost like peace. I took pleasure in the dusty silence, punctuated now and then by a cough or a child’s squeal, and the smell of stillness that hung between the stacks.
Struck by my frequent visits (and probably guilt-tripped by Nathan), the head librarian, Frank, offered me a job. I nearly turned it down. I was wary of making attachments to new people and places that might vanish just as Max had vanished into the night. In the end, through a combination of pleading and absurd flattery regarding my organizational skills, Nathan convinced me to give it a try. I’m grateful that he did. Without that job, I never would have met Lacey, the girl who told me about the runaway restaurant.
She didn’t call it that. She didn’t remember its name. Runaway restaurant was something I came up with on my own. It was the place where all the kids who’d run away from home ended up, sooner or later. For some it was a pit stop. Get yourself a hot shower, a grilled cheese sandwich, and then you were on your way. Others lingered. Took on odd jobs while they figured out where to head next. Lacey had been one of these.
“I was the youngest kid there, seven or eight,” she recalled as we shelved biographies one afternoon. She didn’t say what she’d run away from, and I didn’t ask. “There wasn’t a whole lot I could do, but I tried. I would sweep, refill drinks, pick the gum off the bottoms of the chairs.”
Lacey was a twenty-something of indeterminate origins with twelve facial piercings and a slash of dyed yellow hair. Yesterday, she’d overheard Frank talking with someone about Maxine’s disappearance, which had just reached its two-year anniversary. That was when she remembered the runaway restaurant.
“What—you just forgot about it?” I asked.
“It’s sorta like that,” said Lacey. “I think they design it that way on purpose. So people don’t go around blabbing about it once they’ve come and gone.”
She took a Churchill biography, consulted the call number and wiggled it into place. I stared unseeingly at the spine of the book in my hand. Lacey struck me as someone who had done a lot of drugs. Her brain was probably fried. She didn’t know what she was talking about. Or else this runaway restaurant was a fantasy she’d invented to help cope with some trauma, the way lonely children will cling to imaginary friends.
We finished shelving the books and rolled the cart back to the elevator.
“This restaurant,” I said as Lacey jabbed the down button. “Is it nearby?”
“Nah. Somewhere east, near where I grew up in New York. And north, I think.” She gestured vaguely toward the library’s paneled wood ceiling. “Yeah. There was a Canadian or two in the mix. They used to stop in for a bite after they made it across the border.”
“But you don’t know where exactly? You don’t have the name of the town?”
“I told you, it doesn’t work like that. They design—”
“They design it that way on purpose. Yeah. I remember.”
The elevator dinged. The doors juddered open. Lacey rolled the cart inside. My chest felt heavy, stuffed with wet wool. There was this grief counselor Rhonda and I had seen a few times, a white woman with a kind, doughy face and ink stains on her slacks. She used to talk about grief as if it were a drug addiction. You could suffer relapses. Without warning, you’d be wallowing in old agonies for days.
Lacey sighed and clattered her ringed fingers against the cart’s handles. “It’s only the runaways who can find it. The runaway kids.” She said it under her breath, like a prayer. She looked at me out of glazed blue eyes. “If you can find one, maybe they can lead you to it.”
Nathan and Gwen were pleasantly surprised at the prospect of my road trip. Four weeks, I told them, to visit family in Missouri. They agreed to look after the house—no real burden, once I stopped the mail and let all the plants die. I arranged to take the time off work, which is to say, I announced my intentions to Frank eighteen hours before I departed, and he shrugged one shoulder and said bon voyage.
I drove through the streets of Tacoma just before dawn on a Tuesday, a half-empty duffel tossed in the back seat. Rain had fallen during the night. Street lamps cast murky orange circles in the wet roads. Along the bay, massive cranes hung over the silhouettes of scrap metal ships. I got out of the car and stood beside the brightening water, replaying in my head for the millionth time the scene of Max’s leaving, certain, as always, that if I got the details just right, I could prevent it from ever having happened.
Where could she have gone? It was a question Rhonda and I had turned over and over back when we were still together. Where could she have gone? The fears, too dreadful to name, and the delusions: Max lounging on a boat with a Coke sweating on her stomach, Max skiing down a steep slope, goggled and grinning. She had never expressed any desire to travel. Her school friends said they had no idea where she might have gone, though they admitted Max had “changed” in the past six months, grown crabby and secretive, slouching into soccer practice late so many times the coach had threatened to suspend her. Teachers, too, recounted my daughter’s quieting—how though her grades remained steady, she had relocated to desks in the back of the room as if to separate herself from classmates.
“Why didn’t we know about any of this?” I exploded at Rhonda one night. “Why didn’t anyone tell us?” I paced back and forth before the open window. She sat on the bed, squeezing hydrocortisone from a flattened tube. Stress hives bloomed on her belly and arms. She swigged liquid Benadryl at every meal, stumbled around with a glassy, irritated look in her eyes.
“There are a thousand students in that school,” she snapped. “They can’t possibly track the behavior of every one. Max is our responsibility. Not theirs.” I sank onto the bed, forehead pressed to my palms. She softened, then. Rubbed my back and said, “I didn’t notice anything different about her, either.”
The sun was rising. I got back in the car and flipped down the visor against the glare. I was not going to Missouri. I entered Rhonda’s new address in New York, though I didn’t plan on going there, either. I just needed a destination point that would get me east. East and north. For the time being, this was enough.
But I had underestimated my own reluctance to sit in a car for twelve hours. That first day, I made it only as far as Missoula before crapping out in a Comfort Inn, kneading the knots in my shoulders beneath a lukewarm shower spray. The second day, severe thunderstorms blackened the sky. A wall of rain raced in from the west and my slashing wipers could not clear it. I fell two hundred miles short of my goal of Bismarck and spent another restless night on an overpriced mattress, blinking away the afterimage of highways unspooling beneath my eyelids.
I tried not to think about Lacey or her restaurant. When I inevitably did, I felt so mortified I nearly leapt into my car and sped back to Washington. I must have been losing my mind. What else could explain why I was driving 3,000 miles to track down a magical restaurant on the word of a colleague who sometimes struggled to alphabetize DVDs? I’d gone off the deep end. Blown a gasket. Cracked. But in this realization, there was relief. The daily drives became easier. I slept better at night. I pictured a tiny window opening in my sternum: out whooshed all my fears like a cloud of bats. I really believed I could do this. I could bring our daughter home. It was sometime during this period that I invented the name “runaway restaurant” and started to dream about Max secure within its walls. At night, I watched cooking shows on hotel TVs, collecting their images of comfort: flaky breads and gleaming tomatoes, soft heaps of lemon zest, soup thick with potatoes bubbling in big iron pots.
At a rest stop near Cleveland, I took it upon myself to call Rhonda. I could count on one hand the number of times we’d talked since separating. But there at the picnic table behind the building with the McDonald’s and the restrooms and the arcade, a clean, sharp breeze blowing in off Lake Erie and seagulls picking through the trash, I was pleased to hear her voice.
“I’m at work,” she said. “Are you all right?”
“I’m great.” Snow lay in piles around the table, stamped with the footprints of people who’d come and gone. Someone had drawn a smiley face with the tip of a finger. I stooped to add buckteeth and horns, the way Max would have done if she were here. “I’ve got this job at the library—well, I’m not there now. I’m actually taking a bit of a drive. I’m in Ohio. Did you ever notice how many flags they’ve got along the highways? Like you need to be constantly reminded you’re in the U.S. Do they do that in other countries, or is that just an American ego thing?”
A pause. I heard what was either the rustling of papers, or the static of a bad connection. “Did you say Ohio? Where are you going?”
“Don’t know. Wherever the wind takes me.”
More rustling. Definitely static. Rhonda’s voice came out tinny and small, as if she were speaking through one end of a metal pipe. “You don’t sound right, Dee. If you’re driving east, why don’t you come stay with me for a night or two . . . Are you alone?”
“Are you?” I asked. I told myself it didn’t matter. What was it to me if Rhonda had found some other woman to swirl hydrocortisone over the hard-to-reach patch in the center of her back? But my optimism was curdling. I wished I had not called. “I have to go now,” I said before she could respond. “I’ll call you.”
I hung up and stood there looking at the water. The hand that had been clutching the phone burned with cold. As I made my way back to the parking lot, I resolved not to call Rhonda again, and not to pick up if she called me. I wouldn’t speak to her until I had news about Max.
When I entered New York, my GPS began to admonish me for my refusal to leave I-90 and take the route to Rhonda’s place. I unplugged it and threw it into the backseat. I felt sore and unwashed and bloated from the fast food that had sustained me since leaving Tacoma. But I wasn’t without hope. In five days, I had traversed nearly the length of the country, a feat of which I would not have believed myself capable a year ago. The worst was behind me. Now I had only to find a hitchhiker.
I left the thruway, and for two days wandered the serpentine back roads of farm country still in the grips of winter. Jacketed figures shoveled snow from around mailboxes. Horses tugged carriages along the side of the road, capped and bonneted children peeking out the back. The two or three hitchhikers I did encounter were men with large backpacks and beards and hoods pulled up against the chill, and I needed a teenager, someone young whose plight would open up the avenue to the runaway restaurant.
On the eighth day since leaving Tacoma, I met a friendly trucker at a rest stop who informed me that hitchhiking had gone out of fashion, so to speak. Travelers were traumatized by tales of abduction and murder, while more and more companies forbade their drivers from offering rides to strangers. It was not what I wanted to hear. I sought to convince myself that it was just the cold weather preventing the surge of appropriately-aged hitchhikers from appearing.
I checked into a hotel near Poughkeepsie and stayed there for five nights, living off room service and vending machine pickings, watching my money run out. The trucker’s words had reignited old fears that closed around me like a fist: Max’s body dumped in the woods, covered in a thin film of snow for some shocked grounds crew to uncover. Or, worse yet, Max alive and fighting to stay that way, the shadow of a faceless villain looming above her.
Defeated by these visions, I called Gwen and told her she and Nathan could expect me by the end of the week. I checked out of the hotel mid-afternoon and returned to a world made damp and shining by the April thaw. Ribbons of half-melted snow ran along either side of the two-lane county highway. Stopped for gas at a Sunoco, I unzipped my jacket and let the breeze lift up and under my flimsy sweater. I saw my life stretching out before me like so much highway, stripped of all familiar landmarks. No Rhonda. No Max. I heard my daughter scolding me in my head. She hated self-pity, deleted her Facebook account because her timeline was nothing but people feeling sorry for themselves. “Snap out of it, Mom,” she’d said when Rhonda, passed over for a promotion, had cried one night after work. And I had shouted at Max—called her cruel and selfish—and she had shouted back, and Rhonda had wept, and no one ate dinner, and how was I to know this chaos was a kind of love I’d learn to miss?
I got back in my car. I was cold and sweating. That night, combing the streets of a small town in search of a place to sleep, I found my hitchhiker.
Her name was Angela, and for the first hour that she sat in my passenger’s seat, I halfway believed she was a hallucination. Angela had a square, fat face framed by neat curls, pale skin pocked with acne, and a damp green backpack that hung from her shoulders like a wilted vegetable. She wore jeans, an orange flannel, and galoshes—no coat—and said she was sixteen.
“Where you going?” she asked me when I slowed to pick her up.
“Anywhere you want,” I said.
She held me in her stare for a moment. The headlights of the car gleamed in her eyes, which were dark brown, like Max’s. Then she climbed into the passenger seat, shut the door, and gestured east, toward the first stars. “That way’s as good as any, I guess.”
We drove through most of the night, heading in the direction from which I’d just come. All fatigue had left me, as had any notions of returning to Washington. I was bursting with questions about the girl, but held back, wary of scaring her. For her part, Angela seemed entirely uninterested in why a middle-aged woman should take directions from a teenage hitchhiker.
“Let’s go left,” she’d state listlessly when I came to an intersection. Or, “How’s about we try this way for a bit.” Near daybreak, she fell asleep. I pulled into a side road next to a sodden field and chanced a few hours’ sleep as well, curled against the window. When I woke, my joints had tightened like screws. Angela watched me over the fold of a sweatshirt she must have taken out of her bag to keep warm. Her lips were thin and chapped.
“Are we ever gonna get something to eat?”
“We can,” I said, “if you’re hungry.”
“I gotta pee first.”
She stepped out of the passenger side door. The midmorning sun made a bright sheen of the mist rising from the wet field. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched her yank down her blue jeans and squat. I knew I should give her privacy, but I was terrified that if I let her slip from my sight altogether, she’d disappear.
We ate breakfast burritos at a Taco Bell in a traffic stop town about ten miles north. I plugged my phone charger into an outlet. There were five missed calls, all of them from Rhonda. I sent Gwen a quick text, telling her I’d changed my mind and decided to stay in Missouri a little longer after all. Angela had finished her burrito and was now scraping up the last of the salsa with a corn chip. Her gaze drifted onto my face and hung there indifferently.
I said, “My name’s Dahlia, Dahlia Mun, but you can call me Dee. Everyone does.”
She nodded.
“I’m taking a cross-country road trip,” I went on. “I’m an artist. A photographer. I photograph barns. But I’d be happy to drop you off somewhere. Is there someplace you’re trying to go?”
She shrugged. In the glare of the hanging lamp above our table, her promise began to fade. She struck me as a little stupid. She pinched some chip morsels from the bottom of the paper carton and sprinkled them into her mouth. Salty crumbs rained into the collar of her sweater. I was disappointed. I had wanted her to be more like Max.
We drove through the next three days, Angela offering directions at every crossroads. She never spoke, not even to ask for food. She seemed to trust that we’d stop before she got too hungry. Each evening, I shelled out money for a two-bed motel room. Angela took long showers that filled the bathroom with steam. She left toothpaste smears in the sink, puddles on the floor next to the tub. One night, I emerged from the bathroom to find her sprawled in bed, watching a police procedural. Sirens howled. Cops cracked puns over a body bag.
“Turn that off,” I snapped.
She obeyed at once. The room dropped into silence. I felt my frustration coiling like a spring as I got into bed. I wanted to be patient with her. She was still my best chance at finding Max, and she was only a child. But for all her apathy, I sensed that Angela knew exactly where she wanted to go. Though we might drift eighty or ninety miles south, or cross the border into Vermont for the day, we always returned to the same looping Adirondack roads, as if drawn by a great magnet. The runaway restaurant was near. Angela, for her own selfish reasons, was keeping us from it. I thought she’d grown complacent, reluctant to surrender the personal chauffeur who provided her with free lodging and food.
All of that would end soon. Nineteen days into my road trip, my credit cards were maxed out. Everything else I had was tied up in a 401K. I stopped for gas at a Stewart’s, watching the white numbers tick higher and higher with a curious low-grade panic. Angela had gone inside to use the restroom. I no longer worried about her running off. She was with me, I knew, until I did something to drive her away.
I took out my phone. Three more missed calls from Rhonda. In the car, Angela had glanced at the phone resting in the cup holder each time it rang, but did not ask who I was avoiding. Now I leaned against the filling station and waited for Rhonda to pick up.
“Dee?”
“I need to borrow some money,” I said. Angela emerged from the Stewart’s with a pint of ice cream. I wondered if she’d stolen it or if she’d had some cash on her all along.
“Where are you?” Rhonda asked.
“Some place called Long Lake.”
“That’s not far from me. You could be here in two hours.”
“Look, if you can’t help me out—”
“I can help you,” said Rhonda. She sounded so calm and reasonable. “But you need to come to my place. That’s the deal. You have my address.”
She hung up. I grimaced and stuck the phone in my pocket. Angela stood by the passenger side door, sucking mint chip off a plastic spoon. She’d rotated through all the outfits in her backpack and was wearing the orange flannel again.
“Are we going somewhere?” she asked. It was the first thing she’d said to me since returning my half-hearted “good morning” six hours ago.
“I don’t know,” I said nastily. “Are we?”
She stared at me. I walked around and got into the driver’s seat. After a moment, Angela joined me in the car, and we pulled back onto the road. Old snow patched the fields in gray. Everything dripped, the air too warm for winter, too cold for spring. I didn’t ask her where she wanted to go. I plugged in the GPS, which was still programmed with Rhonda’s address. The ice cream melted quickly. Angela brought the pint to her lips and slurped it like soup.
Rhonda was renting a small brown ranch house two miles from the university where she worked. I parked in the shared driveway and told Angela I’d be right back. The last shards of daylight sparkled through the trees. I rang the bell and stamped my sneakers on the rubber welcome mat, aware of how disheveled I must look, how unwashed.
Rhonda didn’t look much better. In Tacoma, she’d been proud of her graying hair and styled it in beautiful waves. Now it hung slick and drab past her shoulders. Swaddled inside an enormous knit sweater, she appeared shrunken and shapeless. Her glasses were very dirty. She held out her arms to me, and we embraced in the doorway. It was all so familiar. Had Max really run away? Had any time passed at all?
“What’s this all about?” she asked. She hung my coat on a peg behind the door and led me into a warm kitchen that smelled like burning oil. “Are you in trouble?”
“No. I’ve just been traveling, you know. For therapy. I took the time off work to clear my head. I wasn’t paying attention to my expenses, is all.”
“That doesn’t sound like you,” said Rhonda.
“Well. I’ve changed. Haven’t you?”
Rhonda said nothing. She was never a chatty person, and over the years I’d learned to decode her gestures and silences for their hidden meanings. But now I had no idea what she was thinking. She took a hissing kettle from the stove.
“Tea?”
“No thanks,” I said. But she poured me a cup anyway, because I had wanted some, and she had known it.
As we sat sipping our oolong, Rhonda asked me questions about the house and the city, the people with whom she’d fallen out of touch. Her tone was cautious, but I found myself happy to talk about Tacoma. I realized I was homesick. I missed the grand white bulk of Mount Rainier, the weird cone tower at the Museum of Glass, the perfect temperature that rarely dropped below freezing. And I missed Rhonda. All these months, our daughter’s absence had sat between us like a stone, but tonight I felt it encircling us, pressing us close. We would never be able to replicate what we’d had before Max left, nor could we return to our twenties before she had entered our lives. And yet I began to see a way for us to be together again. I wondered if Rhonda could sense it, too. Caught up in the possibility, I forgot why I’d come in the first place, until I saw movement out of the corner of my eye and Angela slid into the room. She’d come through the front door without making a sound. Rhonda started and dropped her teacup.
“I told you to stay in the car,” I hissed.
“Is she here with you?” said Rhonda, looking from Angela to me and back again.
“It’s cold.” Angela shoved her thumbs in her pockets. Her galoshes leaked brown slush onto the floor.
“Dee,” said Rhonda. “Who is this girl?”
“She’s just a hitchhiker I picked up. I’m giving her a ride to—” I couldn’t say it. It was too humiliating.
Rhonda recovered quickly. She was the sort of person it was very hard to take by surprise. She directed Angela to take her chair while she added more water to the kettle. Angela stared at me hollowly across the table. She looked like she hadn’t slept in days, but I had heard her soft nasally breathing each night in the motel room. Rhonda draped a sweater across the girl’s shoulders, then poured hot tea into a mug. As Angela bowed her head and began to drink, I felt an old, giddy rage heating my insides. I was angry at Rhonda for fussing over a child that was not ours. I was angry at Angela for her naïve willingness to be cared for by total strangers. And I was angry at myself for bringing us all together in this terrible pantomime of home.
“You really are stupid,” I said. Rhonda looked up, but I was talking to Angela. “I told you I photograph barns. Do you know how many fucking barns we’ve passed? Have I stopped to take a picture of any of them? Jesus, Angela. You can’t go around getting into cars with strangers! I could be a murderer. I could have a chopped-up body in the trunk. But you wouldn’t know any of that, because you’re too dumb to suspect a thing.”
Angela lowered her mug, her expression grave. This was nothing like fighting with Max. There was no answering rage to bounce off of.
“I’ve been driving you around for four days,” I said. “You say you don’t have any place to go. Well, you better find one, and stay there, because you’re not about to make it on your own. You’re too trusting. You’re too fucking young. And the next person whose car you get into? They are gonna be a murderer. They’re going to take you into some pimp’s house, or drive you into an empty field—”
“That’s enough,” said Rhonda. She looked stricken. I saw she had been thinking of Max, too. I stopped speaking and raised my teacup to my lips with shaking hands. Angela was still staring at me, and I thought with resignation that she hadn’t heard a word I’d said. But I was wrong: After a moment, she stood and walked out of the room, galoshes squeaking. I hurried to follow, but by the time I reached the front door, it was hanging open, a cool breeze roaming the hallway.
“Dee, what is going on?” said Rhonda as I grabbed my coat.
“I have to go. I’ll call you.”
I raced into the yard. Full night had fallen. I glanced wildly from left to right. Behind me, Rhonda flicked on the outside lamp, and I saw a figure marching down the driveway.
“Angela—wait!”
I caught up to her at the road, panting, a stitch cutting into my side. She stood with her arms wrapped around her. I tried to give her my coat, but she wouldn’t take it.
“I didn’t mean it,” I said. “You’re not stupid.”
“Yeah you did. And you were right.”
A car sped by, spraying wet pebbles around our ankles. I could sense Rhonda watching us from her door.
“At least let me take you somewhere,” I said. “A police station or—maybe—” I didn’t know how to finish the sentence. I realized, finally, that I had no idea where lost children went.
A slim white hook of moon hung above a distant field. It was so silent here. I wondered how Rhonda could stand it. Angela rubbed her hands up and down her arms.
“OK,” she said at last. Relief rolled through me. I felt like I’d been handed a gift. We walked back to the car once more, got inside. “But not to the police,” said Angela. She buckled her seat belt and leaned back, palms braced against her knees. “I know where I want to go.”
We drove an hour south, then another twenty minutes east. We were the only travelers on the road. Mountains rose around us, two shades darker than the sky. The clouds cleared. Driving along a narrow highway, flush against a forest of giant evergreens, we were faced with a panoramic of stars.
“Wow,” I said.
Angela murmured a noise of assent. She had entered an unknown address into the GPS. Its directions led us off the highway and into a rundown town that cradled a body of water, a lake or a pond. It was impossible to tell in the darkness how far it went. Even though I knew Max would not be waiting at our destination, I still suffered a wave of nearly unbearable defeat when we pulled up in front of a blue house with a crumbling front porch: not a restaurant, but someone’s home, the faint babble of a TV leaking into the night. I rested my forehead against the steering wheel. I knew then that this journey had been for nothing.
Angela stepped carefully over the porch’s broken steps and knocked at the front door. I joined her. I didn’t know what else to do. There was a pause as the TV cut out. Then the door opened, revealing a large middle-aged woman in a faded green nightgown who shared Angela’s square face. Her eyes widened. She began to scream: “Bob! Bob!” An impossibly loud voice, like a foghorn in that quiet. She stepped forward and yanked Angela into a hug so fierce, it was nearly violent. “Oh, Angie. Oh, merciful God . . .”
A short man in a bathrobe came hurtling down the stairs. “What is it? What’s going on?” He had his arms held to his chest, ready for a fight, but they dropped and hung at his sides when he saw Angela clasped to the woman’s chest. “Angie,” he said weakly. “Is it really you?”
The girl was passed inside to Bob, who held her more gently. The woman swiped her streaming eyes with the back of her hand. It was startling when she turned to me. I had forgotten she could see me. I had forgotten I could be seen.
“You’re with the police?”
I shook my head. I didn’t know how to explain. Inside, Angela buried her face in the man’s shoulder. Some tension fell out of her body. She slumped against him, exhausted. I could just make out her whispered chant: “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
Tessa Yang's work has appeared in Hobart, The Cincinnati Review, Foglifter, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from Indiana University and currently lives in Upstate New York, where she is an assistant professor of English at Hartwick College. Find her online, or on Twitter: @ThePtessadactyl.
Photo by Picturepest on Foter.com / CC BY